Well, we don't know whether leg 7 is or is not an elimination. But I don't think we'll be leaving Moscow without an NEL.

The detour, both sides of it, were hilarious. The swim coach was excellent as a judge, she did seem to be very consistent about what she would accept.

theschnauzers,

My definition of a NEL (which may be different from the World Race Productions' definition) is different from a TBC. The TBC for leg 7 is executed with no elimination at the Bolshoi Theater pit stop. Once that happens, if you count the remaining legs before the finale you get 4 and if you count the teams to be eliminated that's 3. That means there can be only one more NEL for the remainder of the race. It's possible that it occurs in Moscow 2, but I consider that very unlikely.

The detour was good. I expected though that the judge would be quite lenient with the synchronized swimming (just like the Bollywood dance in the last season). The library task looked the easier one to do, and actually on the side of one of the filing cabinets did appear to be the Russian alphabet in alphabetical order, but I'm not sure either team noticed it.

The question of how the "skill" routines are judged for obviously inept teams is an interesting one. Mark's Bollywood dance routine in Tanzania was not getting better. It was getting worse. I believe that someone on the World Race Productions' production staff makes the decisions and somehow communicates them to the individual doing the pass/fail scoring. I suspect that the same thing happened with multiple teams against the Chinese ping pong champion. That champion could serve at any level they wished to and easily won every point for a long time if they anted to. For the later-arriving teams she elected to give them a break. That may have been production-mandated.

The same thing came up last night. It did not appear that James/Abba had really passed. They were given a mercy pass at some point.